Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful nfidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, cate-gories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, 1991.Cyborgs not centaurs…
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
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- I could easily escape the curse by claiming that the name of a theory is of no importance, and that, after all, serious scientists avoid the name Gaia as much as possible, preferring the euphemism “sciences of the Earth System.” But this would be cheating; it would amount to passing from one ambigu …
Science as pure myth
I could easily escape the curse by claiming that the name of a theory is of no importance, and that, after all, serious scientists avoid the name Gaia as much as possible, preferring the euphemism “sciences of the Earth System.” But this would be cheating; it would amount to passing from one ambiguous character to another that is even harder to define. “System”? What weird animal is that? A Titan? A Cyclops? Some twisted divinity? By avoiding the real myth, we would land on a false one. Myth and science, as we well know, speak languages that are only apparently distinct; as soon as we approach the metamorphic zone that we have learned to identify, they begin to exchange their features, so that they can manage to express, to extend, what they want to say. “There is no pure myth other than [that of] science purified of any myth,” as Serres put it.
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: eight lectures on the new climatic regime, 2017Collections that include this source
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- What is a myth? If you ask a Native American, there is a strong likelihood that the answer will be: a story from the time when humans and animals were not yet distinct. This definition strikes me as very profound, because—despite the clouds of ink raised by the Judeo-Christian tradition to obscure …
of our Imagination
